Dutch bass player Peter van Straten has been a respected sideman throughout this career, providing the low end for Nina Hagen,Eric Burdon, Herman Brood and Billy Preston. Currently living on the sticks of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, he started composing for the sheer fun of it, teaming up with Alex Ayuli who wrote most of the lyrics. The project is named Street and they end up with 40 songs. A change meeting with Gerry Rafferty, who convinced him that he should sing his own songs, gets the ball rolling. After getting in touch with a handful of seasoned Dutch musicians it becomes a larger scale project: Street & Stone. A studio is booked in Limmen, The Netherlands and the stack of songs is narrowed down to a dozen tracks for a full-length, Turn.

Van Straten has a rather fragile voice, but it fits the melancholy of the songs. Most of it mid-tempo melodic rock with a hint of psychedelica although he can channel Lou Reed too (in the first verses of verses of Peace) and slip into disco-tinged AOR (Paradise). It’s all about intimacy and the need to belong (but not at any price, mind you). Turn is an album that grows on the listener. What took him so long to come forward as a front man? Well, let’s be grateful that he did.

Street & Stone:
Peter van Straten: vocals, acoustic and electric guitar, bass, mellotron, piano, Hammond organ
Rene van Barneveld: pedal steel, acoustic guitar
Nico Brandsen: Wurlitzer piano, Hammond organ
Leon Klaasse: drums
Wouter Planteijdt: guitar
Allard Robert: French horns
Jan Kooper: saxophone


Be Not So Fearful

Can't Say Goodbye

Nothing Is Enough

I Must Have Told You

Peace

Paradise

Glasses

Beginners Mind

The Thief of Time

Don't

Dutch/American band based in California

 

ONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER—and the most inspiring

Street of Street and Stone rediscovers his roots as far away from home as possible, producing the new album “Turn” 

 
Leaving behind what is vital to one’s well being: sometimes it has to be done.    From complex to simple—from Amsterdam to log cabin in Northern California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. One of Holland’s best bassists Peter van Straten, who worked with artists like Nina Hagen, Billy Preston and Eric Burdon, turns his back on his comfortable life and journeys west, in an attempt to get back to the roots of it all. 

“I had a good thing going, a great way to make a living but not to feed the soul.  ” says Street, the name by which van Straten now goes. “I needed to do something new, something less self-centered. I needed to meet new people and work with my hands in a different environment.”

Disregarding the music scene for a while, Street found himself doing manual labor in a vineyard. Realizing the growth he was experiencing, he purchased a piece of land with a log cabin on it—the place where the urge to write new music resurfaced. 

Next came the crucial moment in which Gerry Rafferty—for whom Street had played some of his songs—told him he needed to sing his own songs rather than write them for someone else. This was the turning point.

“I started writing with no particular end point in mind, just something different,” says Street. “For the first time, the journey was more important than the destination. It was about the joy of the moment.” After three years, this left him with nearly forty songs of which a mere 
twelve were chosen for “Turn.”

“All songs were now recorded at my home studio, and the idea of releasing an album suddenly seemed a necessity. To get it out of my system and into the world so to speak,” says Street. For the mixing and mastering, he contacted his friend and engineer, Frans Hendriks, in Holland. Frans had converted an old farmhouse into a studio. Just a few minutes from the place Street grew up, it seemed the perfect space to combine new and old—fresh inspiration and familiar musicians.

 

The farmhouse became Street’s “new home” for a few weeks. “The vibe was great,” he says. “Frans and I went over a list of musicians I knew from the past to see who we wanted to collaborate. It all worked out very organically, and made me realize that from now on I would work with a collective of musicians.” A link between solitude and the world out there...hence the transition from Street to Street and Stone. 

Thus, on “Turn”, the debut album of Street and Stone, we hear the Pedal Steel and Acoustic guitars of Rene van Barneveld (Urban Dance Squad), Wurlitzer Piano and Hammond Organs by Nico Brandsen (Kane), the unique Electric Guitar layers of Wouter Planteijdt (Sjako) and Drums by life long friend Leon Klaasse (Powerplay, Pilgrims).

Alex Ayuli of A.R. Kane / MARRS wrote most of the lyrics. This would be a surprise only to those who didn’t know Street and Ayuli had been collaborators for years. Street’s layered low end gracing a couple of the late A.R. Kane recordings. 
But that was then and “Turn” is very much now. 

So listen, listen. 
It’s time to TURN.





Street & Stone

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